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Chapter One
His best friend was dancing with his girl.
Actually, since they were attending the Halloween wedding of Owen Blackwell and Callie Templeton, Superman and Wonder Woman were actually the ones getting their grind on. But their costumes didn’t disguise the long rippling dark hair that flowed down Juliet Reece’s back or the way Tristan Eves flashed that smile meant to detonate panties.
Randy Pruitt gripped the neck of his beer that much tighter. Besides, Juliet wasn’t his girl, whether she was in the persona of Wonder Woman or just herself. Juliet didn’t even like him. Tolerating him was a big step on most days. But in his head, he’d claimed her.
Now evidently Tristan was claiming her in reality. Or he would soon.
It wasn’t as if Randy had missed the vibe between Juliet and Tristan every time they’d been in each other’s orbits recently. They were both huge flirts, the types to smile as easily as they breathed, but theirs was more than a casual seduction. They weren’t just dancing. What Randy was witnessing was the prelude to a fuck, and he was no goddamn voyeur.
The time had come for him to get some air. Away from this room. Away from them.
Randy had made it halfway down the hall, pushing through crowds of scantily dressed fairies and way too many pseudo presidential candidates, when he stopped and threw back the rest of his beer. Stupid. What was he running from? So what if Juliet and Tris hooked up?
They were both single, as he was. It wasn’t as if Randy had ever verbalized his interest in Juliet to his buddy. Tris wasn’t a mind reader.
As for Juliet, she didn’t give him the time of day, night or any time, period. When she bothered to acknowledge him, it was usually something work-related and as brief as possible. Rockstars didn’t mingle with the crew. At least one as perfect as Juliet wouldn’t. Not that she’d ever indicated that to him, he’d just been a roadie long enough to know.
Sure, there were the occasional fumbles in the dark when the talent grabbed whomever was handy, but in the sunshine, nope. They kept to their assigned areas and that was that.
He liked rules and delineations. Normally, he even preferred them. But everything was starting to feel itchy lately, including the boxes he’d drawn around his life. His older sister, Harper, was happily settled in her life with her own rockstar husband, Deacon McCoy of Oblivion. Between their young daughter Alexa, her catering business, and feeding her hungry menagerie of rockers as Oblivion’s resident chef, she never had a spare moment to think—and that seemed to be exactly what she wanted.
She’d grown up in that vagabond lifestyle just as he had, thanks to their roadie parents. The senior Pruitts were currently on tour with the Raging Eleanors, and not the least bit concerned about hanging it up and retiring. Why would they? They were as happy as could be.
Just as Harper was. She’d been as aware as Randy was of the unspoken boundaries between the crew and the musicians, and yet she hadn’t let it hold her back from falling for her husband. Deacon sure hadn’t seen her as anything less either.
Randy traded his empty beer for a new one off a passing tray and slipped back into the crowd. Not that he had any reason to be thinking about the differences between his brethren and those in the spotlight. His role was to support, to give them room to shine—literally, since he was the head lighting tech on the abbreviated west coast leg of Warning Sign’s “Spark It Off” tour.
Fitting, since Juliet had called him “Sparks” with no small amount of derision since the night they’d met, just before the lighting disaster during Warning Sign’s concert at the Blue Rhino. It just happened to be a disaster he’d been indirectly responsible for. He’d rushed through some of his usual checks, and he’d paid the price afterward.
The club and the record company hadn’t bruised his ass. No, he’d done that himself, over and over again in the months since. Closing in on a year later, and he still hadn’t lessened his pre-show checks back to pre-Rhino levels. He’d gone from precise to militant. Almost obsessive.
Just like he was obsessive over one Juliet Reece, and her stupidly huge dark eyes and smart mouth.
He had a smart mouth too, but he just never managed to use it when she was aiming her zingers at him. Somehow he went mute whenever she glanced his way, whether it was to make a request or to gripe.
“Can you lessen the blue light tonight during ‘Carried Away’? It’s blinding me when I turn toward Michael.”
“Is there any way that the pink and the yellow lights can be aimed away from me during the bridge of ‘All Night Long’? I get so hot and they only make it worse.”
He’d simply nod and work on whatever she asked. She never made unreasonable demands, and she almost always said “please” and “thank you”. If anything, she was pleasant to a fault. But every now and then, something would go wrong, and she’d blow up—always at him, as if he held the universe in his hands.
“Goddammit, Sparks, if that beam swung any lower, I’d be decapitated. There has to be a way to fix that.”
Her reaction was so over the top sometimes that he’d been tempted to ask her if she was just a diva or if there was more to it. If something had happened in her past to put that fear in her eyes when the lights came too close or something sparked into flame. Granted, anyone with any sense was cautious around fire. But Juliet was always polite until those moments, and he suspected there was a reason.
Would he ever find out? Probably not. He couldn’t ask, and she wou
ldn’t confide in him. She didn’t confide in anyone from what he’d seen.
Maybe Tristan. Perhaps he would be the one to unlock her secrets.
“Fuck,” Randy said under his breath, tossing back some of his beer before diverting left and up the winding staircase to the second level. On the way, he pulled off the mask that had made him hot all damn night.
Freaking Batman. As if he was a superhero of any sort. Unfortunately, “geek in a corner” had sold out before he arrived at the masquerade shop.
It was probably breaking Halloween wedding protocol to remove part of his costume before the end of the night, but he needed space. Room to breathe. There was a reason he’d gravitated toward the crew, particularly working as a light engineer. While others were illuminated, he was left in shadow. The way he preferred to be.
Taking the steps two at a time, he found himself in a darkened hallway. Voices were sparser up there, the crowd thinner. He might even get a chance to shed the cape and actually work the kinks out of his shoulders for the first time that night.
At one end of the hallway, a door stood open. As he approached, he glimpsed the balcony beyond a pair of French doors. Wavering watery blue stripes of light bisected the far side of the room. Pool outside, probably. He could hear the splashing and laughter.
If anyone else had come to the wedding stag, he hadn’t seen them.
Technically, he hadn’t either. He and Tristan had driven together. In Tris’s case, it hadn’t been because of a lack of female company. More like he preferred to arrive single so he could meet and mingle without impunity.
“Weddings are the best place to meet a babe, Rand. All the singletons are lonely and looking, wondering if their true love is out there somewhere. Ripe for the plucking, and we swoop in.”
Right. Tris had swooped, or Juliet had swooped. Mutual swooping, from what he could tell when they’d been up against each other on the dance floor. Even with Tristan’s Superman cape blocking some of the view, Randy hadn’t had a problem making out Juliet’s flirty smile or the way she kept slipping so naturally into Tris’s space, angling those corseted breasts so they brushed his buddy’s chest with every movement. Her Wonder Woman costume left little to Randy’s unfortunately vivid imagination, and neither did the intent in her large dark eyes. Every emotion she felt mirrored there, and hers for Tristan was pure want.
Not your problem, dude.
Randy sucked down another gulp of beer and moved toward the balcony. Fresh air, finally. It felt like he’d been in this house—gorgeous as it might’ve been—for a lifetime. Houdini’s estate was a popular place for events, and the happily married couple had apparently met there the previous year at yet another shindig. Since the place was special for them, it made sense they’d get married there.
As for him, he wasn’t feeling too special about any-damn-thing at the moment.
